ABBEY HOUSE MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat: 12 – 5pm
Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last admission: 4.30pm
Address
Abbey Walk
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
ABBEY HOUSE MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat: 12 – 5pm
Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last admission: 4.30pm
Address
Abbey Walk
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
LEEDS ART GALLERY
Opening Hours
Mon: Closed
Tues -Sat: 10am – 5pm
Sun: 11am – 3pm
Address
The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AA
LEEDS CITY MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed (11am – 5pm on bank holidays)
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat & Sun: 11am – 5pm
Address
Leeds City Museum
Millennium Square
Leeds
LS2 8BH
Ticket Provider
LEEDS DISCOVERY CENTRE
Opening Hours
Visits by appointment/special event only.
Free public store tours are now available by booking in advance. Please call or email us.
Address
Leeds Discovery Centre
Off Carlisle Road
Leeds
LS10 1LB
LEEDS INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: Closed (10am – 5pm on bank holiday Mondays)
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 12 – 5pm
Last admission one hour before closing.
Address
Canal Road
Leeds
LS12 2QF
KIRKSTALL ABBEY
Opening Hours
Mon: closed (10am – 4pm on bank holidays)
Tues – Sun: 10am – 4.30pm
Last admission: 4pm
Address
Abbey Road
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
LOTHERTON
Opening Hours
Open Daily
Estate opens: 7.30am
Hall: Open (Downstairs only) 10am-5pm
Wildlife World: 10am – 5pm
Estate closes: 7pm
Last entry 45 mins before estate closing time
TEMPLE NEWSAM
Opening Hours
House: Tues – Sun: 10.30am – 5pm
Home Farm: Tues – Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last entry 45 minutes before
THWAITE WATERMILL
Address
Thwaite Lane
Stourton
Leeds
LS10 1RP
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Dying Matters: The Day of the Dead Festival
Collections, World CulturesDay of the Dead altar
World Cultures Curator Antonia Lovelace explores newly gifted Mexican Day of the Dead Festival items for the collection!
In October 2016, during preparations for the Dying Matters display at Leeds City Museum, Lourdes Parra Lazcano -a Mexican PhD student at the University of Leeds -offered to bring back Day of the Dead items from Mexico City for the collection.
In Mexico, families welcome back their dead in the joyful Day of the Dead celebrations on the 1st and 2nd of November. Special altars are built at home, and people also visit cemeteries with food and candles. The model altar of printed cardboard shows the range of items offered to the dead. Lourdes’ gift also included orange paper carnations, a selection of coloured festival paper-cuts, a special sugar cake, a toy Catrina figure (a famous rich and satirical lady skeleton), a sugar coffin with a pop-up skeleton head, and a sugar skull.
The first sugar skull met with an accident on the flight back to Leeds, however, when a passenger sat on the bag it was in, and it broke into many pieces.
Lourdes Parra Lazcano
In her youth, Lourdes loved making the altars for the Day of the Dead at home. There’s lots of mixing and matching of symbolism in Mexican Catholicism: for example, crosses for the homemade altars are made out of flowers. In some cases, the altar can be a bit of a class issue. Middle and Upper class Mexicans are now getting more into USA Halloween traditions, and you can see lots of these Halloween decorations outside most doors in the well-off apartment blocks. Many Halloween things can be bought more easily in the supermarkets. Supermarket stock might include a Catrina head on its own, but mostly the more commercial westernised plastic skeletons, ghosts and plastic pumpkins are available.
A while ago, the special bread for the altar was handmade in your own kitchen or sold by local bakers during the festival. Now, you can buy the bread in the supermarket. Lourdes gave us a candle that resembles this special bread. The bread recipe has been changed and standardised, and you can now find this bread before and beyond the Day of Dead celebration (not only during those special days). There is a danger of most things being imported from China, and not made in Mexico at all!
Some people do still visit the cemeteries and make the altars at home, especially lower class families and those in the smaller, more rural communities. The altar food is not usually eaten, it is just for the spirits who come to visit at night.
It is the government that prompted the new tradition of the Day of the Dead street procession, with close links to the James Bond film Spectre, as discussed in Day of the Dead Parade Guardian article.
At the University of Leeds, the Mexican Students Society make their own annual Day of the Dead celebrations. Below is a group photo from Lourdes taken at the University in 2015.
The Leeds University Union Mexican Students Society
The positive respect for death, and the family ancestors, that the Day of the Dead festival encapsulates is of huge interest around the world and we are really pleased that Lourdes has helped us represent this tradition in the Dying Matters exhibition in the Leeds Story Gallery at Leeds City Museum.
By Antonia Lovelace, World Cultures Curator.
Ellie Harrison, a Leeds artist creating the ‘Grief Series’ – a seven part arts project associated with the Dying Matters campaign – has been successful in applying for funding to make her own trip to Mexico City this coming November. Leeds Museums and Galleries is hoping that the collections will also benefit from this project, and Lourdes will be able to help Ellie Harrison too. Visit the project ‘Grief Series’ website for more information.